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For the latest in Direct-to-Consumer sales. Featuring posts on compliance, direct sales tips and trends in the wine industry.

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February 27, 2008 | Matthew Mann

REthinkCompliance: Ship Direct = Ship Correct

I’ve been working in wine shipping compliance for over a decade. In the past, some wineries would ship anywhere and everywhere, regardless of the rules. As more states move to permit systems allowing direct shipment and greater accountability by wineries, some of these wineries continue to ship anywhere and everywhere, often because of ignorance of the rules. Fortunately, I worked with wineries who took the high road, shipped only to where it is legal, filed required reports on time and paid taxes when due. I can tell you from experience that the high road is also the right road. Aside from any moral or ethical judgments, shipping illegally is simply bad business, both for the individual winery and for the industry as a whole.

Better for the Winery
Taking the high road by staying compliant is by far the better business plan. Sure, there are some increased costs in time and effort to complete compliance reports and pay permit fees. But these costs can be anticipated and worked into your profitability model. Any successful business operates with a plan and certainty of expected results based upon that plan. Additionally, staying compliant keeps the business owner in control. In a heavily regulated industry such as alcohol, placing the future of your business in the hands of outside parties such as state regulatory agencies is a bad idea. Retain as much control as possible by staying within the boundaries of the law. The cost of getting caught - substantial fines, license suspension, even having your federal permit suspended by TTB, far outweigh the short-term benefit of whatever sale was made illegally. Fines that gut whatever profit you made off that sale aside, if you have your license to produce wine pulled, you’re out of business. Your entire capital investment in land and equipment is put at substantial risk.

Better for the Wine Industry
Since Granholm, direct shipment opponents are attempting to scare states into believing wineries can’t be trusted to follow the rules, that shipping abuse is rampant, and that the only way to combat these abuses is to level down…essentially eliminating direct shipping altogether. The basic premise suggests that wineries are inherently irresponsible and can’t be trusted. This is why it is critically important that wineries follow the rules and stay in compliance with state laws. By staying compliant, arguments of wineries’ ignoring or abusing the laws have no merit. The wind is taken out of the sails of direct shipment opponents. Further, demonstrated compliance by wineries will create an atmosphere in state legislatures of trust that the wineries will follow the rules. This trust will result in less confusing, less restrictive and less expensive rules and regulations to follow.

I support efforts to remove barriers limiting access and choice in the marketplace. The best way to accomplish that is to play by the rules as they stand and advocate for change in the state legislatures. REthinkCompliance was designed to assist wineries in staying compliant by taking the confusion and burden out of compliance at NO COST to the winery. Not only does REthinkCompliance provide access to the state laws in an easy to understand fashion, it provides compliance checks to make sure you are within volume limits or not shipping to dry areas. Best of all, REthinkCompliance generates complete, accurate sales, excise and shipment reports easily so you can file reports on time, pay the taxes due, and stay compliant. I encourage you to visit the site at www.rethinkcompliance.com. Not only will it save you time and money, but you’ll be helping the industry demonstrate that wineries can be counted on to play by the rules.

Feb 27, 2008 at 1:56 PM

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February 25, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

Think Globally, Act Locally

With the growing wine consumption, the US is slotted to become the highest wine consuming nation in the world. So how are you going to capture that market? It is well known that small businesses (such as wineries) must often budget wisely and target promotion of their brand at the local level. So what is my recommendation? Outline your target markets based on where you want your brand to have visibility, but start by venturing beyond your tasting room to tap in to your regional market.

By focusing marketing efforts locally, you can spend your time building not only your brand, but you will also help build the reputation of the region as a whole. This is extremely important in an industry where terroir (or the concept of where your wine is from) is such a defining characteristic of one’s brand. Below are some suggestions of where you might start.

Tap in to already existing regional campaigns as part of your marketing

As it has been a proven selling point in other agricultural marketing, creating a statewide campaign can help boost in state sales and also encourage wine drinkers to choose your wine over an imported brand. Try joining organizations such as Family Winemakers of California, California Wine Institute, or Washington Wine Commission. These are the kind of organizations are supported by both growers and vintners and are dedicated to promoting wine on a statewide level.

Be an active member of the virtual community

You can be involved with your local wine community via the internet. Try signing up for dedicated wine social networks online such as Open Wine Consortium, then volunteer to head a regional group to inform others of local happenings and help execute events in your area.

Optimize your website by listing your business as part of local search engines

Use local key words, submit your website to local business directories, and think about advertising on other websites that may feed into yours such as winery listings and local tourism sites. Begin by listing your winery on the three major search engines (Yahoo, Google, and MSN) which all have a localized search engines. From there, try feeding your content to sites such as Yelp, or Local Wine Events.

Feb 25, 2008 at 1:58 PM

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February 22, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

I really enjoy seeing socially conscious promotions - Clos Du Bois

At Inertia we like things that are both good for business and good for society in the same transaction. I was made aware of this program from Ari Miles about a great program that Clos Du Bois is doing.

They have teamed up with WomenHeart to help support the fight against heart disease in women and are giving away a free trip to Paris.
This is how it works… When you visit KissandTell.com, you’re able to register to send “a kiss”. For every “kiss” (or eCard) you send, Clos du Bois will donate $1 to WomenHeart, the national coalition for women with heart disease. To win a trip to Paris, you must register and submit your own kissing story. The story with the highest rating at the promotion’s end wins. I thought it was very clever with a great cause.

If you are doing a wine/socially conscious promotion - please comment or send it to me and I’ll post - I very much like to see things that give back to the community while helping wineries succeed in sales or branding.

Feb 22, 2008 at 2:16 PM

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February 22, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

That's a Lot of Popcorn

Found an interesting chart today on marketingcharts.com defining the top online retailers by conversion rate. This chart shows the total percentage of visitors to a website who completed a transaction during their visit in the critical December timeperiod. All I can say is “Wow”.

Check this out:

To refresh any memories, a website conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who took a desired action – in this case, placed an order. So, from this info, it appears that nearly 30% of all visitors to thepopcornfactory.com placed an order in December! It should also be noted that retailers only qualified for evaluation in this list if they had a minimum of 500k page views in a month. That’s a lot of popcorn transacting across the web.

Again, wow.

I’ve been in the direct, online business for many years now. I have certainly spent my share of time obsessing over my own conversion rates, and how to increase them. I’ve hired agencies to help. I’ve tested different variables to help encourage purchase. I’ve implemented multiple promotional strategies (Free Shipping! 50% off! Buy this NOW!). All paid off in different ways, and I’ve felt relatively successful with my efforts, but never to the tune of 30%!

I have a new personal goal.

So how do you improve your conversion rate? And what is it that’s driving such high numbers for these sites? I think it’s a number of factors – all of which must play together truly move the needle. Here are my 5 suggestions to start you along the path of improving your conversion rate:

Know where you come from.

Do you know your own conversion rate? You better, if you want to improve it. Use Google Analytics or other analysis tools to define your conversion rate.

Grab a friend

Grab a friend who may be unfamiliar with the nuances of your website and ask them to help you ‘experience’ your website. I suggest you ask them to do two exercises. And don’t forget to watch the entire process. Literally, stand over them – and DO NOT coach them along!

Exercise A) Ask them to visit your homepage and experience your site. Don’t tell them to shop. Don’t tell them to read. Just see what they do. We’ve talked a lot with our clients about the importance of having an easy and intuitive navigational path for our clients (see an earlier post by Ben Chinn, our Director of Web Design & Development: http://blog.inertiabev.com/index.php/2006/10/09/site-structure-and-navigation/), as well as the importance of asking for what you want with headlines and ‘Calls-to-Action’ on the part of the visitor. Both of these efforts can have the desired effect of leading your visitor through your website – ideally to YOUR desired end. Did your friend follow your desired path throughout your website? Did they ‘see’ and act on the things you intend your visitors to? Or did they miss key messages entirely?

Exercise B) Ask your friend to visit your website now with the goal of purchasing a specific product. Start them at your homepage, and watch the path to purchase. Did they get lost? Struggle to find the right page that the product would be on? Did they find the product and the ‘buy now’ button with the minimal number of clicks? Ask them what information they would want to see in order to make that purchase (price, label, tasting notes, reviews). Did they find what they needed? Did it take a few minutes or many minutes, and a lot of ‘back button’ usage?

Resolve to Test and Measure

It’s ok to fail. Seriously. That’s what testing and optimizing is all about. Set a plan for what you want to achieve (in this case, higher conversion rates), list all of the potential tactics for reaching that goal, and get started. There are a number of things you can test: headlines, promotions, graphics/images, positioning of information on a webpage, the order of your navigational links, etc. For each tactic tested, watch “before and after” results. Did things improve or get worse? If they got worse, great! You learned what doesn’t resonate with your visitor. Another item off your list…

Take Baby Steps

Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because your conversion rates may be lower than you like, and the shopping experience of your ‘friend’ was clunky, doesn’t mean your entire site needs to be overhauled. Commit to taking baby steps to learning about improvements in your conversion rates. Implement small changes at a time, and measure their impact. Learn what helps your visitor along to purchase and what doesn’t. And give yourself some time to learn. Commit to testing something over at least a week, if your visitor traffic is significant enough to give you ‘usable’ data. If it takes a month to get a real read on results, then give it a month.

Be Relevant and Meaningful

Your visitor is going to engage with you, and continue to engage with you if you provide something relevant and meaningful to their needs. Think about your own online shopping experience. When you need something and a site has it, that’s relevance. But when you make that relevant product or information entirely MEANINGFUL to them, you’ve now started a relationship. How do you make things meaningful?

Watch how visitors move through your site. Which pages do they spend the most time on? This can give you an idea of the type of content your visitors are most interested in. Finding a lot of activity on your Recipe’s page? Put it up front! Make it easier to find your Recipe pages, add a link to this page from relevant product pages.
Watch what visitors are purchasing. Likely the bulk of your sales are on products you’re well known for, have greatest distribution on, and/or highlight the most on your website. But if a sleepy Zin that’s getting no play on your homepage is actually selling fairly well, it’s telling you to give it some presence. Try it out. Suggest to visitors that this is a “Customer Favorite”, and post any reviews that you can get from your customers on that product.

Don’t forget about your follow up marketing, as well: Email. Once you know what people are purchasing, and where they are going on your website, send emails that demonstrate this. I buy a lot of products on Amazon.com. And, at least once a month I receive an email suggesting other relevant products. This makes my experience with Amazon more meaningful to me. I buy. They suggest. I like that.

What are you doing to stimulate conversion rates? Have you ‘experienced’ your website? Are you bringing something meaningful and relevant to your customers? Think of it this way: if your website was achieving a 15% conversion rate, what kind of sales would that translate to?

Again. Wow.

Feb 22, 2008 at 2:04 PM

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February 19, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

Simple Math: CRM Conversion

Over the past few months we have blogged about various ways that our winery partners leverage the REthink Engine to increase their sales, and a topic that comes up time and again is conversion (check out some of the recent BLOG entries that touch on this subject: How much is your average order? & Email Campaign Effectiveness). The subject of conversion should begin with one question: how much does 1% of your total sales represent? All things being equal in the world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, the best solution is one that drives the highest % conversion. In speaking with wineries who struggle to justify the cost of such a solution, especially when they currently possess all the CRM “pieces”, some simple math usually helps them to see the light…so to speak.

What do I mean by conversion? Well, there are many types of conversion when it comes to Direct Sales. One common example of conversion is the % of sales transactions relative to the total # of campaign/promotion recipients (email, direct mail, etc.) For example, if you send an email blast to 1500 people which results in 15 orders, the conversion rate is approx. 1%. Unlike email campaigns which have relatively zero cost (depending on your email solution), this conversion rate for direct mail campaigns is critical to understanding ROI associated with cost of paper, stamps, etc. Here are some other examples of conversion that are the result of a sound CRM solution: conversion rate for customers vs. club members, conversion rate for declined credit cards, conversion rate for allocated wines vs. non-allocated, and so forth…

What is the relevance of 1% of sales when it comes to conversion? Again, if all CRM solutions are the same in terms of cost, the solution that provides the highest compound rate of conversion will provide the highest ROI. By doing some simple math to determine the % of sales and/or cost savings (i.e. declined credit card conversion) that can be achieved through leveraging the right CRM solution, most wineries come to the realization that a significant amount of the costs are offset. One more factor in the conversion equation is Time: by converting time previously dedicated toward costly administrative activities to customer-facing, revenue-generating activities a winery can focus on what they do best…making great wine and building customer loyalty for their brand. The conversion rate math is simple, especially when it comes to calculating based on sales, but the tough question is…what is your time worth? By answering this question, you will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that working smarter and leveraging a better CRM solution is the best decision for your direct sales business.

Feb 19, 2008 at 2:18 PM

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February 15, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT – Keep it fresh!

Content is one of the most important parts of your website. It is how you bring your wine and your winery to life and yet another– very important – way that search engines will find you. There are many important things to consider when reevaluating your current website content, but here’s an easy and quick win: KEEP IT FRESH!

How will you keep your website up to date and worth coming back to?

Keeping Your Site Fresh
As you know, it is important that you keep your homepage and all your content fresh and up to date. It is extremely frustrating for someone who visits your events page to only to find events from several months ago, or to see Outdoor Party recipes in the middle of December.

By updating your content on a regular basis you are not only seen as more professional to your visitors, but you also trigger search engines to take another look and move you up in the rankings. The most important page that search engines look at is your homepage, so be sure that you are continually refreshing some of the content on that page.

When did you last refresh your website? Make a plan for upcoming dates to add new and refresh old content: Weekly, if you can; Monthly; Quarterly; and/or Seasonal/Holiday

Here are three key tips to implement now:

Update your calls-to-action (CTAs)
Ask for what you want; make your specials/kickers actionable. Your CTA is what is going to point your visitors in the direction you want them to go. Use CTA’s throughout your site, reinforcing your website goals. Caution: If you don’t have any CTA’s on your home page, they will have nothing to guide their experience throughout your website.

Include a “Seasonal Features” Section
Link to this page from a Kicker on the Homepage. Offer new recipes and food pairings each season. Discuss what’s happening in the vineyard at that time. By doing so, you will give users a reason to visit again, as well as give search engines an additional way to locate you for their searchers. But REMEMBER: keep search engines happy by updating with text-based elements and not simply images.

Keep News & Events Current
The key to maintaining a successful website is keeping your information fresh. By keeping your news and events updated you:

Hold the attention of your audience, and create interest in your website.
Provide a reason for your visitors to return – most of us don’t read the same book over and over again. Give your visitors a weekly or monthly “magazine” and they’ll subscribe!
Increase spending as a direct result of an extended customer focus created on your site.
Improve the likelihood your website will be indexed higher on search engine results.

Feb 15, 2008 at 2:24 PM

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February 14, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

It’s Just Shopping

Heard something brilliant the other day when I was discussing ecommerce “best practices” with someone at the office. “It’s just shopping” she said. And it all makes sense. We all know how to shop in the real world (and know what we like and don’t like about certain stores), so why should an ecommerce shopping cart be any different?

Over the years, I’ve heard and read so many different articles with different views on how the cart should work on a website, and what are the “best practices” today. Not last month. Today. Well, considering how much time I spent building ecommerce sites, and how much money I spent shopping on ecommerce sites, I’d like to throw my 2 cents into the mix. Here are my top 10 “how the shopping cart should work”.

Use a dynamic shopping cart

When you’re grocery shopping, you wouldn’t want to be sent straight to the cashier every time you put something in your cart. So don’t take the customers away from where they are when they click the “add to cart” button. Let them decide where they want to go next.

Allow quantity when adding to cart

There’s nothing stopping you from putting 2 bags of marshmallows in your cart, so why should it work differently on any website?

Include a store navigation accessible from anywhere in the site

When you’re ready to move from the produce section to the frozen meats, you don’t always go back to the store’s entrance and start over do you?

Include related products on product pages

Not on the shopping cart page. Not on the review your order page. On the product detail page. That way you know the ketchup and mustard are both condiments (related), and you don’t end up seeing one of them sitting next to the paper towels.

Forms should be top aligned

UI studies show it is easier and faster to fill out forms if the names of the fields are directly above them. So you work on the form from top to bottom, rather than left, right, left, right, left right, … You get my point.

Specify optional fields, not required fields

Most fields are required anyway.

Shipping address should be an optional step

9 out of 10 customers ship to the same address as their billing address. Don’t put up the entire shipping address form just to intimidate them. The less work they have to do, the more likely they’ll actually finish the checkout process.

Ability to save carts

I know you can’t do this in the grocery store, but don’t you wish you can? So you can put together your cart for next week’s grocery since you’re already in the store, and all you have to do is to come back next week to the store and pay for it.

Large buttons

I love it when I get to Home Depot, all I have to do is look up and know exactly where I am suppose to find what I need and pay for things when I’m done. Make your “add to cart” and “checkout” buttons stand out. Please.

Beauty is important

White space is good, but too much of it is bad. Wouldn’t a badly designed site and checkout forms make you a little uncomfortable? Maybe it’s not a legitimate site? Maybe it’s not secure? Maybe I should go to someone else whose store “looks” better?

Feb 14, 2008 at 2:28 PM

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February 11, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

Wineries Must Compete with Retailers for Online Sales

You may have heard of big wave surfing, in places like Maui, Hawaii’s Jaws or at competitions such as Mavericks on the coast of Northern California (check out the documentary Riding Giants). Last month I enjoyed a great day at the beach watching the Mavericks competition. It’s a bodaciously insane surfing event where the world’s best must be towed by jet skis to catch 30-foot waves.

What’s that got to do with wine marketing? Well, it made me think of an analogy - here goes:

The metaphoric big wave is the expected growth of online wine sales. Numbers don’t lie - so here are the recent stats for the year 2007 (courtesy of the Wine Market Council):

38% of Millenials (those born between 1980 and 1993) say they are drinking more wine. Nearly all Millennials will be of legal drinking age in the next 5 years and this group will drive both consumption gains and taste trends.
18% percent of core wine drinkers (those that imbibe at least once a week) have purchased wine online.
64% of those purchases were done on winery websites.
Over the next 5 years online wine sales will triple!!!!!!

My point today is that the big wave is coming for online wine sellers, be they wineries or retailers. How will they surf it and which channel is best prepared to capture these new consumers we keep hearing about? The telling number here is that 2/3 of online sales in 2007 were direct, i.e. from winery websites. As online sales grow, will wineries keep that market share, or will it dwindle?

I would argue that currently retailers are better poised to ride the wave. Like the surfers, if you want to ride big, you literally need some ‘pull’- pull marketing that is! Retailers have quite a bit of it already, are getting more, and it will increasingly help them.

Wineries have many advantages over the traditional retail channels like content, branding, being the producer, loyalty built through hospitality etc., not price however. These strengths work great to retain customers acquired directly (via tasting room, clubs, website…). However, harnessing the power of the web to acquire new customers is another feat entirely - hence the need for pull marketing. To keep with the analogy, wineries have superior surfing skills but they don’t have a Jet Ski to help them catch that mythical break. Bummer dude!

A newfound desire for wine, marketing, demographics, deregulation, supply… all converge to generate and sustain new demand. The new wine buyers that make up the big wave are the famed Millenials. Who are they? What is their purchasing behavior? How do they shop? What makes them tick? These are questions anybody selling wine online should be asking. Yep, the eCommerce revolution is hitting the wine world.

Like most savvy online shoppers, these new wine buyers will first look to shopping portals, vertical search engines, social shopping sites, social networks, blogs, forums, etc. to get information, prices and to make a purchase. If a prospective online wine buyer has not visited your winery or received an email from you or heard a recommendation from a friend, chances are he or she may not first look to your website to buy wine. That person will Google what they are interested in and see a very long list of possibilities - only one of them being your winery’s website.

That plethora of options can be daunting, so smart entrepreneurs have created marketing services that act as filters to help consumers find what they want quickly. You know the main ones: Wine-Searcher, WineZap, CellarTracker… and the newer ones: Snooth, Winelog, Vinquire, Radcru, TasteVine, Vino2Vino, Calwineries, Bottlenotes, Cork’d, ClassicWines… There are many. These essential outfits compete to cater to the needs of the inquisitive wine lover. With a few exceptions, they look to wine sellers to fund them. Almost all paths to purchase lead to a retailer paying for a click or a sale. These wine marketers allow supply and demand to connect, and so far, the supply being connected is represented mainly by retailers. This ecosphere of wine marketers has undeniably helped wine retailers, big or small, build their online business. Can they also help wineries?

Wine retailers have been at the online marketing game for some time now. In addition to experience, they have the advantage of working with large inventory, this makes for economies of scale in marketing. They can feed their product data to various price comparators or product list aggregators and also engage in paid search. Retailers have been quite effective at creating multiple paths to their stores. With the growing appetite for imports, this pull marketing is what will surely help them ride the big wave of online wine sales.

The number of wine producers is growing. The number of distributors is decreasing, as is their appetite for diversity… This classic scissor effect creates the need for wineries to find customers outside their usual hunting grounds. No one can argue that the web can be the largest source of new sales. We can agree that retailers already have an edge in this regard. So, given this situation, how can wineries effectively compete for new online customer acquisition?

They need to find ways to enter the same marketing channels as retailers and have their products and content listed on as many wine search engines, databases, social networks or marketing programs as possible and have links to their store wherever their brand is mentioned. Not only will having links and content listed outside your website help your SEO, it is the surest way to bring in traffic and sales.

In acquiring new customers from the web, I would argue that:
- wineries can hugely benefit from such pull marketing
- wineries actually have many strengths they can leverage over retailers
- wineries can play on mediums retailers cannot
However, for wineries to make this happen, they need what only retailers have - scale. Wine marketers need to work with compatible entities, requiring low overhead for data collection. I would argue that for wineries to build this kind of pull marketing, they need an enabler who can bring scale to the table. By working with multiple wineries, using a common data platform, such an enabler can broker on their behalf to make this happen.

In case you’re wondering where this is going… Inertia is busy building the Jet Ski that will help its clients ride the big wave. To beat the analogy to death, I’ll say that what powers the jet ski and how it pulls is best kept for a later blog post… Gnarly!

Feb 11, 2008 at 2:34 PM

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February 8, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

Winery Promotions for Every Day and Week of the Year

The thought struck me, as I watch a client of ours, Twisted Oak Winery, execute a brilliant promotional campaign called “Take your Chicken to Work Week” (going on now through February 10th with the overview here and details here), that our social calendars are completely and utterly governed by marketing around holidays.

This is, of course, no revelation to anybody that has purchased a bag of Hershey Kisses in the last 10 years. This is no different for winery marketers either as I have been inundated with wine-related Valentine’s Day wine specials. I would have to drink multiple cases of wine in one day to satisfy even a fraction of the promotions that I have seen from wineries and online retailers.

You know the promotional drill: Christmas gives way to New Year’s that gives way to Valentine’s Day that gives way to President’s Day that gives way to St. Patrick’s Day that gives way to Easter that gives way to Memorial Day that gives way to the 4th of July that gives way to “Back to School” that gives way to Labor Day that gives way to football that gives way to Halloween that gives way to Thanksgiving that gives way to, well, we start the cycle all over again.

And, while, these calendar-ized marketing routines that begat social engagement are all well and good and help drive marketing promotions when people have their so-called buying aperture open, there is something to be said for being that salmon that is swimming upstream, or to paraphrase Led Zeppelin, the winery that is going ‘in through the out door.’

What I mean by this is, if you are a winery continuing to muscle your way onto an ever-bigger stage measured by wine club members, direct sales, mindshare online, etc. than different is good.

If you are going to be different, a “Take your Rubber Chicken to Work Week” in lieu of Valentine’s Day promotion is a dandy idea.

And, while we can all pat Twisted Oak winery owner Jeff Stai on the back for continuing a wild streak of creativity that sets his winery apart from the crowd, the reality is that every single winery reading this can do the same. The rules are simple:

1) Tap into the vein that carries your winery DNA and determine what is unique and different about you

2) Maximize that determined differentiation by marketing yourself uniquely and in accordance with your ethos.

That is it, really. Who are you and how do you communicate your unique difference to people?

This sounds great on paper, but it much harder to achieve in real life, just ask Jeff at Twisted Oak, and I am sure he would echo the same, “easier said than done.”

However, here is a place to start: go to Amazon.com and buy a book and CD-Rom combo called “Chase’s Calendar of Events.” This book is called, for good reason, “The bible of special occasions” by the Los Angeles Times. Chase’s Calendar is a global view (representing 194 countries) and a single reference for special events, holiday’s, federal and state observances, this-day-in history notations, and anniversaries. There are 12,500 entries and all are searchable via the CD-Rom.

Today, February 8, 2008, for example, is “Laugh and Get Rich Day,” in addition to being the 98th anniversary of the founding of the Boy Scouts of America.

The point is, any day that resonates with your winery DNA is a perfectly suitable occasion for promotions, and likely a better clutter-breaking option than the same holidays that others will be marketing around, increasing competition.

So, as your Valentine’s Day promotions die down, and you lament the number of other wineries vying for the same share of wallet from your customer, you may want to celebrate “Laugh and Get Rich Day,” swim upstream and plan your next promotion off the beaten path. A little bit of planning, ingenuity and the Chase’s book can help you break free from the clutter of “major holiday” promotions and truly stand out.

*NOTE* A quick Public Service Announcement: Tina Caputo, formerly the Managing Editor at Wines & Vines and now a freelance writer and wine critic, is accepting samples for her monthly column at Wine Review Online (WRO). WRO is under the radar to many folks online, but their line-up of writers is truly impressive. Likewise, Tina’s an evenhanded pro and if you’d like to submit samples to her, please contact her at: tinacaputo@yahoo.com

Feb 8, 2008 at 2:37 PM

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February 5, 2008 | WineDirect Admin

To bring a bottle to the restaurant, or not

Recently my wife and I went to dinner with another couple. I had purchased a wine on line that I wanted my friend to try. I called the restaurant and asked if they had a corkage policy. They did. They charged $10 per bottle. Of course this is a great deal because we usually spend $70 - $80 on a bottle at a restaurant. The wine I brought cost me $30, but it was much better than what we most often get at the restaurant.

When I told my sister about our experience at the restaurant, including the fact that we had brought our own wine, she said that she thought it was bad taste to bring wine. She used to work in a restaurant, and felt that the restaurant owner spends much time in selecting wines for their list that compliment their food, and that choosing to bring another wine is an insult to the owner/manager. She also pointed out that restaurants depend on the revenue they get from their wine sales to remain profitable.

I disagree with her. The restaurant made $10 on the wine, with no investment. Yes, they usually make $30 or more on the $50 bottle we purchase, but maybe that is part of the problem. Most wine lists are pretty pedestrian, offering the same assortment of wines that are popular in the retail stores, or offering wines that they can buy for a great price, and markup three to four times over their cost. Additionally, if they did not want us to bring a bottle with us, they could simply have a policy against doing so.

The best way to try a new wine is when it is served with an excellent meal. I go to a restaurant for the food, and of course, I choose a wine from the list that matches that meal. If I can enhance my dining experience by bringing a new wine with me, why shouldn’t I? I’m not talking about going to the local retailer and buying a bottle of Kendall Jackson Chardonnay to try. I’m talking about bringing wines that I haven’t had before, and that most likely are not available in the local market.

One provisio however. When determining the tip for the waitstaff, assume that you had purchased a bottle of wine from the list, and then tip accordingly. Your wait person shouldn’t be penalized because you chose to bring in your own wine.

Feb 5, 2008 at 2:39 PM

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